Paper ID: 2308.15096

How Faithful are Self-Explainable GNNs?

Marc Christiansen, Lea Villadsen, Zhiqiang Zhong, Stefano Teso, Davide Mottin

Self-explainable deep neural networks are a recent class of models that can output ante-hoc local explanations that are faithful to the model's reasoning, and as such represent a step forward toward filling the gap between expressiveness and interpretability. Self-explainable graph neural networks (GNNs) aim at achieving the same in the context of graph data. This begs the question: do these models fulfill their implicit guarantees in terms of faithfulness? In this extended abstract, we analyze the faithfulness of several self-explainable GNNs using different measures of faithfulness, identify several limitations -- both in the models themselves and in the evaluation metrics -- and outline possible ways forward.

Submitted: Aug 29, 2023